Various application programs generate information about electronic files/documents as the electronic files/documents are created within the application programs. Information is typically saved within an electronic document under various properties of the document. These properties are viewable by users through a document properties tab accessible through a pull-down menu within an application. Although the information can vary from application to application, it is typically related to the document's creation. The information might therefore be categorized in properties such as an origination property that includes the document's author, creation date, revision number, who last saved the document and the date they saved it. Another property might be a statistical property containing information such as the number of pages, paragraphs, lines, words, and characters the document contains.
Although such information may be useful to the author of a document, it does not help in understanding what happens to the document after the document has been completed. Information regarding how a document is used after it has been created may be useful for various purposes. For example, print history information including when, where, and by whom a document has been printed may be a useful tool to help track the use of the document. Such information may be of particular benefit for tracking secure documents that have restricted access. Such print history information might also be useful in maintaining document databases and for metrics reporting purposes. For example, documents that have little or no print history over a given time period may be deemed to be of no use and therefore removed from a database, while those with recently active print histories might be retained in the database as still being useful.
Accordingly, the need exists for a way to accumulate print history information for individual electronic documents, maintain associations between individual electronic documents and their corresponding accumulated print history information, and present accumulated print history information to users regarding individual electronic documents.